Frank Ocean: ‘I Had the Time of My Life’ Making ‘Blonde’

Frank Ocean sated his fans’ hunger for new music on Friday (August 19) when he finally dropped the much-anticipated follow-up to his 2012 debut Channel Orange. In a pair of Tumblr posts, the singer discussed the making of the album and thanked fans for pushing him to finish the long-awaited project.

“I had the time of my life making all of this,” Ocean wrote. “Thank you all. Especially those of you who never let me forget I had to finish. Which is basically every one of ya’ll. Haha. Love you.”

“Two years ago I found an image of a kid with her hands covering her face,” Ocean wrote of the idea to title his album Blonde. “A seatbelt reached across her torso, riding up her neck and a mop of blonde hair stayed swept, for the moment, behind her ears. Her eyes seemed clear and calm but not blank, the road behind her seemed the same. I put myself in her seat then I played it all out in my head.”

He added that he often found the editing process of the album “romantic,” and said that he felt as if he was in the presence of a “$16m McLaren F1 armed with a disposable camera.”

“My memories are in these pages, places closeby and long ass-numbing flights away,” he explained. “Recording in Tokyo, NYC, Miami, LA, London, Paris. Stopping in Berlin to witness Berghain for myself. Trading jewels and soaking in parables with the many-headed Brandon aka BasedGod in conversation.”

He concluded by noting that while his teenage years were rough, as he looks in his rearview mirror, the residual trauma is “getting small enough to convince myself it was all good.”

“Boys do cry, but I don’t think I shed a tear for a good chunk of my teenage years,” he added. “It’s surprisingly my favorite part of life so far—surprising, to me, because the current phase is what I was asking the cosmos for when I was a kid.”